Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to methods and systems for modeling of agent skills in a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) and more particularly to a model based on or more closely matching categorization structures of the CRM system.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems provide support for customers of a product or service by allowing those users to make requests for service that can include a question posed by the user related to the product or service. For example, a user may log onto or access a CRM system provided by a manufacturer of cellphones and request information related to use of that device and that may include a question such as “How do I adjust the brightness of the display?” Generally speaking, these systems receive requests for service, e.g., in the form of a phone call, web page form, instant message, email, etc., and route the requests to a human agent for addressing the request and providing an answer to the question. In many cases, the agent is selected based on the topic of the question or request and a predefined profile of that agent that includes indications of the agent's skills and/or expertise. This skills-based route can be done by an Automated Call Distribution (ACD) system that is either part of or separate from the CRM system.
Traditional ACD systems offering skills-based routing capabilities model skills in a generic way decoupled from the CRM system. This leads to inefficiencies when integrating the two systems. For example, as a consumer first visits a vendor's website to search for solutions related to a product type and/or issue type, and then subsequently the consumer requests to chat with a live agent, the contact center has to translate the product/issue information expressed by the consumer into a skill definition understood by the skills-based routing system. This translation is done via manually configured business rules that are complex to manage and can easily get out of date as new products and issues are added to the system. Furthermore, as agents work on many incidents related to specific products and/or issue types, there is no way to directly correlate the agent's performance on those incidents back to the skills definition for that agent. Thus, the agent's skill level score must also be manually configured and again can easily get out of date. Also, because the administrator has to manually manage the set of skills and maintain the agents' skills score per skill, the set of skills must be kept at a small and manageable size (e.g. 12-20 skills). Hence, there is a need for improved methods and systems for modeling of agent skills based on or more closely matching categorization structures of the CRM system.